2 x 80GB SSDs or 1x 160 GB SSD?

[ShootinIron]

I'm building a new gaming system and using a Shuttle XPC SX58H7 (the Core i7 one) as a basis, meaning space is kind of at a premium.

My initial thought was it would be best to use 1 80GB SSD for the OS and commonly used programs, and then use another 80GB SSD for installing games I am currently playing. That way the bulk of the large installs/uninstalls are kept to the gaming drive.

But a single 160GB is not only cheaper, it would use less space inside the case, which is relatively small. There will also be a WD Caviar in there for backing up and for media files.

So am I overthinking this? Does it really matter? I know that with Windows 7 and TRIM it doesn't matter so much any more. But I also know that the more you fill up a drive the slower things tend to be and my goal was to leave roughly 30% free space on the drive with the OS.

Could I accomplish the same effect with partitioning?

 

[Ben90]

I vote for the 160 and partitioning, in a few years when ssds take off id rather have a small, slow 160gb than two smaller slower 80gbs

Having the os and apps on different HDDs is great because you can multitask a crapload more, but with SSDs it really doesn't matter

 

[Tlan]

i would get 2 80gb drives because its cheaper and faster in raid

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Originally posted by: Ben90
I vote for the 160 and partitioning, in a few years when ssds take off id rather have a small, slow 160gb than two smaller slower 80gbs

Having the os and apps on different HDDs is great because you can multitask a crapload more, but with SSDs it really doesn't matter

:thumbsup: What he said. I have so many old small IDE drives laying around I don't know what to do with them. The few larger drives (200+GB) that i was smart enough to buy are actually still somewhat usable for a boot disk. the 80GB drives are just paper weights.

If you are going for pure speed, then maybe 2 drives would be best, but I would worry about the limitation of the raid controller. Most Mobo RAID controllers aren't all that great at managing disk performance. I would be concerned that the IO would be throttled by the controller. I would do some research first. It would really hurt to get them in and find out you need to split them into seperate drives.

Lastly, I would say if performance isn't the main goal, then get the big one and partition...as Ben90 suggests.

 

[mtnd3vil]

Originally posted by: Tlan
i would get 2 80gb drives because its cheaper and faster in raid

Agreed.

Two 80's, if utilized to the full potential, will always be faster than the 160. I don't necessarily feel that raid0 is the only way to utilize two SSDs. Smart placement of your data based on what you use it for could also be fine. OS on one, all installed Apps / games on the other (like you said) could be pretty good. If you're good at manually dividing the workload on two disks you'll still see great performance. Of course, the automatic load balancing method is RAID:

Raid 0 is a lucrative venture for SSDs; mostly because of the anticipated reliability of the drives and the fact that much of SSD performance is realized through internal parallelism and doubling it with a 2nd drive yields great results. Performance scales nearly 2x in all situations.

 

[Xed]

I thought trim wouldn't work in raid?

 

[Emulex]

well if you were doing software raid and the o/s saw the drives as two hardware devices then i suppose it could inflict trim on each one.

but i've yet to see a production quality raid controller hardware that can do trim.

 

[taltamir]

a shuttle can fit 2-3 3.5 inch drives... it could easily fit a dozen SSDs as they are all 1.8 inch form factor and really really REALLY small. When you first get it you don't believe how much smaller it is than a regular HDD.

 

[alcoholbob]

TRIM doesn't work in RAID. Yet, anyway.